Will Ten renovate or demolish The Renovators?

Questions about the fate of The Renovators are bound to come up during the release of Ten Network’s 2010-11 results next week.

The weak ratings of the $25 million reality series, which ended on October 12, dragged down Ten’s overall audience numbers and forced it to give free ads in other programs to The Renovators’ sponsors, including Freedom, KFC, Telstra, LG, Taubmans, Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Wesfarmers’ Bunnings divisions.

Ten shareholder and interim chief executive
Lachlan Murdoch
– who has been running the company since late February, that is, well after The Renovators was commissioned – will be quizzed by analysts about the future of the series and what Ten will do with its budget if it is axed.

(On Tuesday this week, Ten moved the release of its 2010-11 results from today to October 27.)

The series is produced by News Corp’s Shine Group. Mr Murdoch is a non-executive director of News Corp, but Ten commissioned The Renovators before Mr Murdoch became one of its shareholders and before News Corp bought Shine. (The acquisition of Shine, which was 53 per cent owned by Mr Murdoch’s sister, Elisabeth, was completed in April.)

In August, Ten chief programming officer
David Mott
said The Renovators would return in 2012.

But sources close to Ten said its fate had not been determined and if it did return, it would have a significantly lower production budget and a different format.

Ten executives did not make any public predictions about how many viewers would watch The Renovators, which debuted on July 24.

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But they indicated to advertisers and media agencies that it would pull a similar audience to MasterChef, which had an average capital-city audience of 1.5 million this year. The Renovators’ average audience was 725,000 viewers.

Media buyers listed several reasons for The Renovators’ weak ratings, including the success of Nine Network’s rival renovation series The Block (which ended about a month after Ten’s program started), a format that failed to engage many viewers, and the lack a gap between MasterChef 3 and The Renovators, which created reality TV fatigue among some Ten viewers. MasterChef 3 and The Renovators overlapped by two weeks.

“The Renovators struggled from the start and regardless of changes that were made to the show, it was never going to recover from the shaky start," Paul Brooks, head of implementation, planning and investment at media agency MediaCom, said.

“The success of The Block, plus a raft of top-performing, quality shows on Seven, meant The Renovators was always going to struggle.

“But the biggest problem was its failure to create an emotional link with the contestants. The warehouse [in which much of the series was set] was cold, big and impersonal," he said.

“People want to see something transformed from start to finish, from wreckage to gold. In this sort of format, viewers need to be able to live vicariously through the contestants, going on a journey with them and experiencing their hardships, the excitement, the frustrations. The warehouse made that impossible to achieve."

Victor Corones, managing director of MagnaGlobal, said The Renovators concept was strong, but the program was knobbled by “poor timing, over-exposure of the renovation genre and over-promotion".

“Nine’s decision to take The Block from a weekly format to 7pm daily this year proved to be very successful. The Renovators butted up against MasterChef but was too similar in style and format to it. Consumers would have seen The Renovators as too much of a me-too concept."

Mr Corones said Ten also promoted The Renovators too heavily before it started. “By the time it got to air, consumers already knew what was going to happen," he said.